A walk in the halls of time

The crumbling concrete steps of the Everglenn Hotel lead to a doorway in time. Step through and you'll have 100-year-old lumber over your head. Walk down the hall and you'll follow the same path as the miners and railroad workers who, 60-some years ago, came to this little boarding house on the outskirts of Palmer in search of a warm meal and a dry place to spend the night. In the dining room these tired, hungry men found fresh baked bread and pies made from dried apples, and on the beds they found clean linens, hand-washed with water hauled from a community well several blocks away and hung to dry in the basement next to a giant coal furnace.

Made from the lumber of an old Eska Mine dormitory, the Everglenn Hotel has changed hands, and names, several times during its 67-year history. It was the Hyland Hotel, then the Hotel Palmer and, finally, the Everglenn Hotel. All the while, countless characters have filed up and down those concrete steps. Some moved into one of the small rooms, equipped with a single bed, lamp, closet and bureau and maybe a chair, and stayed only a few days. Others lived there for months or even years. There were engineers who came to town on temporary projects for the electric or telephone co-ops. There were young Army soldiers who camped in the basement while they were working on the original Alcan Highway in 1941. There were nurses, teachers, bakers, retirees and vagabonds whose past no one was sure of.

"I wish that building could have talked and told me the stories of before I was there," said Arvita McConnell, who under the name of Evans owned and operated the hotel for 16 years.

Today, though, the Everglenn Hotel has a new story to tell. Look out a paned window on the second floor and you won't see a quiet gravel road and trees stretching in all directions. Instead you'll see an asphalt Evergreen Avenue lined with businesses and cars and trucks flowing by bumper to bumper. Even through the closed window, you can hear the constant rumble and "beep, beep, beep" of heavy equipment clearing a nearby lot for a new development.

Encircled by Burger King, a Subway mini-mall, a bank, a gas station, a drive-through espresso stand and, soon, Fred Meyer, the small, old boarding house is being swallowed up by progress.

There were rumors that Fred Meyer might buy the historic hotel and move it out of the way of its construction project. For now, that doesn't appear to be the case.

"We are not going to purchase the hotel in Palmer," Tom Gibbons, site acquisition manager with Fred Meyer, told the Frontiersman. "That does not make sense for us, especially being that it is a historic monument."

Instead, the national chain plans to construct a fence to screen the Everglenn from what will most likely be a busy entrance past Burger King and to its new grocery store.

Some wonder if this will be enough to protect the integrity of the building, and others speculate it may be better to forego the status of National Historic Place and instead move the building out of the path of development and to some quieter part of town where visitors can enjoy it as a museum. But purists say that in order for the hotel to maintain its historic value, it must stay where it is even as time marches past its front steps.

The Hyland Hotel

Today the two-and-a-half story wood building on Evergreen Avenue bears a brass plaque declaring it a National Historic Place, but it began as just a wall tent and a hole in the ground.

In 1935, Myles and Joanna Hyland purchased the lot from John Bugge, one of Palmer's first homesteaders, according to past Frontiersman articles and history books. The couple had been living in Girdwood, where Myles worked for the railroad, but in September of that year the Hylands began the hard work of building their business from the ground up.

For a year-and-a-half the couple lived in a tent with a cook stove and paraffin oil lamps. While Joanna baked bread and cooked meals in the tent and served them to construction workers and visitors to the Matanuska Colony, her husband began with the basement.

"The basement was all dug by hand," Joanna Hyland wrote in a collection of shorts stories by Palmer Pioneer Home residents. "We wheeled the dirt out by wheelbarrow. The hotel was built in a year-and-half. I had the first bed-and-breakfast in town."

To this day, in the cool dark basement where the coal room used to be, Myles Hyland's original handiwork can be seen. The concrete walls are rough and uneven, and you can see where Hyland moved the few precious forms he had up the wall as the concrete was just barely hardened.

But what makes the old building even more unique is the very wood it was constructed of. The Hyland Hotel is actually a reincarnation of a much older dormitory at the Eska Mine near Sutton. Lumber was hard to come by in the 1930s, and any leftovers from abandoned buildings were reused again and again.

The Lutheran Church had purchased the Eska dormitory, dismantled it and moved the lumber to Palmer to build their original church, now a theater at the Alaska State Fairgrounds. Surplus lumber and windows were sold, and the Hylands used the material to build their hotel, according to the Mat-Su Borough.

When the hotel was finished, the Hylands went shopping in Anchorage and furnished the entire place for $100, according to historical documents. Then they opened their doors, charging $3 for single rooms and $4 for doubles.

Myles Hyland died in 1949 and later Joanna married one of her occasional hotel guests -- a Jonesville miner named James Smith. The couple continued to own and operate the hotel until 1966. In 1998, Joanna Hyland Smith celebrated her 100th birthday at the Palmer Pioneer Home. She died in 2000 at the age of 102.

An old-fashioned boarding house lives on

The booming days of mining and the Matanuska Colony are long gone, as are most of the gravel roads and vacant lots in Palmer. Downtown has spread out to encompass a wider, paved Evergreen Avenue. The Hylands' hotel is no longer on the outskirts of town, nor is set back from the road more than a few feet, but it still stands and its rooms are still full.

Frank Shor has been living at the Everglenn since March, and he wants a bigger room. A man moved out a few days ago, and Shor is convinced that the vacant room is considerably bigger than his own, so he knocks on the manager's apartment door. Dee Reekie answers the door and informs Shor that another tenant has beaten him to the punch and the room has already been taken. The red-haired man frowns, questions whether the other tenant really asked first, and then reminds Reekie that he'll be finishing his cabin soon anyway and moving out. Later he admits that it could be a few months, maybe six or eight, before he leaves the Everglenn.

Shor is one of a handful of men currently living at the hotel, which is really more of an apartment building these days. A baker lives there, as well as a highway construction worker and three cooks from a nearby Mexican restaurant. The cooks are young men who come and go from the hotel by Rollerblade or bicycle. A retiree who has lived there for more than a year occupies the top, attic room.

Rooms are rented out by the month for anywhere from $300 to $525 depending on the size.

Most don't have bathrooms or kitchens of their own, so aren't conventional apartments. But the Everglenn isn't exactly a boarding house, either. These days the tenants don't get home-cooked meals or fresh baked bread. Instead, there is a communal microwave in a kitchenette on the second floor and everyone fends for himself.

Simple, relatively inexpensive, quiet -- it is an atmosphere Shor says he appreciates.

"I needed a place to stay and just walked in," Shor said. A self-described "handyman," Shor said he returned to Alaska after spending a few years in Florida, where he says he wasn't able to make a living. He is vague about what his plans are now, and he says he is in a sort of "forced retirement" that he would like to get out of. He's building a cabin, but seems content to stay in his small room for a while longer.

Reekie lives on the first floor and has managed the Everglenn for about six years. Sitting on her couch, the window behind her looking out directly on the ongoing Fred Meyer construction project, Reekie says she has a good, quiet crew of tenants right now.

Later, Reekie leads the way to the temporarily vacant room on the second floor, where she notices that a lampshade and a chair are missing. The tenants, she said, have a way of scooping up the furnishings in vacant rooms. She will put up a sign demanding that they return what they have swiped.

Looking around the bare, white-walled room, it is hard to imagine that Shor's could be any smaller. There seems to be just enough room for the single bed and a small dresser. The room smells like old, clean wood. The former occupant has left behind some cleaning stuff and an unopened can of beans on a shelf in the closet.

"It's not the Taj Mahal," Reekie tells her tenants. "But it's warm, dry and clean."

Like those before her, she is a woman who doesn't seem like she'd take much guff from her tenants.

"I tell them, 'I can move you in here in an hour, and I can move you out in an hour,'" Reekie says. "It's my way or the highway … This is an old building and the walls are like paper."

Because of the close living quarters, Reekie won't put up with any door slamming, smoking, fighting, late-night carousing or other disturbances. And even as a single, older woman, Reekie said she doesn't ever feel timid about telling a bunch of men how things will be in her building. In this way she is much like her predecessor, 83-year-old McConnell.

"I was very particular," McConnell said from her Sutton home. "I preferred men because they didn't expect everything. Women came and some of them thought when they paid the rent they had bought the place."

For 16 years in the 1980s and 1990s, McConnell and her little poodle ran the Everglenn Hotel. And like Reekie, she drew a hard line when it came to her tenants.

"I used to have quite a reputation of being Palmer's A-1 evictor," McConnell said.

McConnell recalled one time when her heart got the best of her. She was driving down the Palmer-Wasilla Highway in winter and saw a couple living in a tent on the side of the road. She offered them a ride into Palmer and then said they could stay at the Everglenn if they were able to pay.

"I'm real good at being suckered in by people I think need help," she said. "When I found out how they were living … I told them, 'You people are going to freeze to death out there.'"

Once they moved in, however, she quickly discovered her mistake. It turned out that the man was a drunk and cruel to the woman he lived with, McConnell said. She could hear the fights each night and one time the man threw all the woman's clothes out the window and onto the street. That was when McConnell decided to put an end it to it and kicked them out.

"Well, he came down and said, 'You can't do that,' and I said, "You just watch me,'" McConnell said. "I said, 'Buster, I'm going to teach you how to spell O-U-T because that's where you are and that's where you're gong to remain.'"

Another time, McConnell said, she was preached to by a man who said she was going to hell because she wore pants like a man.

"I told him, 'Let me clue you in. I own this place, and it's none of your damn business if I do it stark raving naked … you're not buying my clothes and you're not running this place,'" she recalled.

More often, however, McConnell said she grew attached to the people who lived there. She describes some of the engineers who stayed there as being "absolutely the tops."

McConnell dubbed most of her tenants with nicknames that hinted at something in their character -- there was the girl she called "Quail," and there was "Casanova" and a small, skinny man who also had a way with the ladies who McConnell called "Stud Mouse."

"There is quite a history there," McConnell said. "You could write for a month just stories that have happened at the Everglenn."

The future of the past

Looking at the Everglenn Hotel now, McConnell said she's reminded of a story of a little old lady who kept living in her house even as an entire shopping center was built up around her. It's clear from McConnell's tone that she thinks the old woman was rather foolish.

McConnell worked with the borough to earn the Everglenn its status of National Historic Place in the early 1990s, but now that she no longer owns it she says she doesn't care much what happens to it.

"I don't get attached to anything like that," McConnell said. "With me it's strictly business."

However, she said if she did have an opinion on the matter, she would say the building should be stripped down to its original structure and moved some place such as the Alaska State Fairgrounds where it could be appreciated as part of a historic complex.

Moving it, however, would most likely mean it would lose its brass plaque declaring it a National Historic Place. Register requirements almost always demand that the building remain at its original location. And for those who advocate for historic preservation, such details are critical.

"Well, it certainly is an important historic building, not only for Palmer but for Alaska in general," said Gerry Keeling of the Palmer Historical Society. Not only is the building on the national register, listed as being built in 1936, but because it was made of reused lumber, the hotel actually dates back to the early 1900s, and Keeling says this adds to its historic significance.

When Fran Seager-Boss, cultural resource specialist with the Mat-Su Borough, heard the building might be moved, she sounded an alarm at a Palmer City Council meeting.

"We're very concerned Palmer will lose an important historical building," Seager-Boss said on behalf of the Mat-Su Borough Historical Commission. "We have no other building on the west side of the railroad tacks that is listed on the national register."

Reekie, however, wonders if being an official National Historic Place is all that important if the building is engulfed by development and cannot be appreciated by the public.

The current owner, Velda Jaramillo, lives in California and is interested in selling the building, according to Reekie.

"This location is no longer feasible," Reekie said, gesturing to the Fred Meyer construction clearly visible through her back window.

Ironically, Reekie admits that the building's listing on the National Historic Register has proven to be a hindrance as well as a benefit. Based on comments from Fred Meyer officials, it seems the historic status might have deterred them from purchasing and moving it.

Reekie agrees with McConnell that maybe the best future for the old hotel would be to have it returned to its original state, maybe even decorated with furniture of the time, and set up somewhere as a museum or visitor attraction.

She hinted that maybe a nonprofit group with an interest in historic preservation could purchase the Everglenn and move it to a more suitable site, such as near the Matanuska Maid creamery. She says she has no doubts that the building is strong enough and in good enough condition to be moved.

"This place is built like a fortress … You could move this building clear to Missouri," she said.

For now, though, the Everglenn Hotel is exactly where the Hylands built it in 1936. And, for a while at least, it seems that people such as Frank Shor will continue to find a warm, dry place to sleep even as the traffic zips by and a new box store goes up in the back yard.